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Basketball Geek's Ryan Parker has been looking at how plays end in recent posts, calculating the distribution of each type of play-ender over the past few seasons. And in his most recent post, he pairs that knowledge up with the circumstances under which each play began. The conclusions: Steals are really good (duh), offensive rebounds lead to a high probability of scoring (duh), the old yarn about missed threes leading to long defensive rebounds and better scoring chances appears to be slightly true, and a bit of a surprise -- offenses actually do worst coming out of a timeout (contrary to conventional wisdom, which assumes the coach will draw up a good play for a score).

One Response to “Layups: How you finish depends on how you start”

Timeouts are often called when a team is playing poorly and the game is getting out of hand. Might an offense tend to perform worse after a timeout because of whatever circumstances prompt the timeout in the first place?